The present disclosure relates to the design and synthesis of piezoelectric nanoelectromechanical (NEMS) relays. NEMS relays are an implementation of a mechanical transistor that can be used to build digital logic circuits and memories.
A metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) is a transistor used for switching or amplifying electronic signals. The MOSFET is a common transistor in both digital and analog circuits. Over the past decades, the MOSFET has continually been scaled down in size; typical MOSFET channel lengths were once several micrometers, but modern integrated circuits are incorporating MOSFETs with channel lengths of tens of nanometers. Smaller MOSFETs are desirable for several reasons. The main reason to make transistors smaller is to pack more and more devices in a given chip area. This results in a chip with the same functionality in a smaller area, or chips with more functionality in the same area. Since fabrication costs for a semiconductor wafer are relatively fixed, the cost per integrated circuits is mainly related to the number of chips that can be produced per wafer. Hence, smaller ICs allow more chips per wafer, reducing the price per chip. However, the restrictions on further scaling of MOSFETs have propelled an interest in investigating different switching technologies for computational logic and memory applications.